Resource allocation systems have been developed for assigning work entries to resources according to various criteria. For example, customer contact centers receive requests for assistance or inquiries from customers, and distribute those requests and inquiries to agents within the contact center. Such systems may attempt to distribute work (e.g., requests for assistance or inquiries) to resources (e.g., agents, contact centers, etc.) by placing work entries corresponding to available work into a queue established for work entries having selected attributes or capabilities.
However, contact center outages can and do occur for a variety of reasons. For instance, a contact center, or site, may be taken down deliberately by an administrator so that elements, including software and hardware, may be upgraded or replaced. In some cases, the site may experience a component or software failure. This failure may be due to an overload of activity or contact traffic. In yet another example, the site may be the victim of a failure of a service provider network during an event like a natural disaster.
Typically, contact center systems have backup procedures in place that allow calls to move from a primary site to a secondary site in case of an outage. When a system attempts to route calls to a site that is down or unavailable for any reason, the calls are redirected to a backup site. This redirection of contacts is generally true for all of the contacts attempting to access the site that is down. In some instances, these calls may overwhelm the backup site as they are redirected without consideration for the backup site's load or real-time capability to handle the additional contacts and traffic. If the backup site becomes overloaded, the backup site may also go down (i.e., suffer an outage) and contacts may be disconnected. As can be appreciated, a domino effect may occur where one site overloads multiple sites with bulk call redistribution, causing a chain of outages.